Shakespeare's Counselor (18 page)

This particular afternoon, Pete's son was working in the store. A college student who picked up some money wherever he could, Washington Blanchard considered himself much smarter than his father and vastly more sophisticated. Jack had told me he just hoped Wash, as the young man was called, would learn better before too long. Otherwise, in Jack's opinion, someone was likely to sock Wash in the mouth. Jack had had a gleam in his eye that had said the sight wouldn't be unwelcome.

Though I hadn't noted it on my calendar that morning, today had apparently been designated as Pick a Fight with Lily Day. Most men are put off by me. I just don't seem, I don't know, womanly or something. Especially if they know what happened to me. A small sampling of men, the ones that are sick, are turned on by that very same thing. Wash Blanchard was a member of that small group.

While Pete showed Jack a pair of glasses that took pictures, Wash asked me questions about the woman who'd been murdered in Tamsin Lynd's office. That death had made the Little Rock paper mostly due to its bizarre circumstances. Little Rock as a whole seems to try to forget there's anything south of it in the state.

I hadn't checked this morning to see if Gerry McClanahan's death had made the paper, but I figured it hadn't, since it had occurred so late. At any rate, Wash didn't bring it up, so neither did I.

Wash wanted to know if I'd known the health center murder victim.

“No.”

“There can't be that many women in Shakespeare, Lily.”

“I didn't know her.”

“What was she doing in that building, I wonder. The paper didn't make that clear.”

“She was coming to attend an evening self-help group.”

Wash was astonished. He said, “How do you know that?”

I shrugged, sorry I'd said anything at all.

“Did you see her?” he said. Wash had the usual prurient desire to hear secondhand about blood and death. If he'd ever happen to see it close up, he'd lose that in a jiffy.

“Yes.”

“What did she look like? Was she really impaled?”

I looked longingly at the door.

“Don't talk to me any more,” I said. I began to look at a rack of cameras, the kind that did everything but snap their own buttons. That was my kind of camera. I liked photographs, as aids to memory and as art, but I was not interested in taking them myself.

“Because I'm black? Huh?” And there he was, right in front of me again, determined to bother me. It's like people don't understand English, sometimes.

“It doesn't have a thing to do with your skin. It has to do with your obnoxious character,” I said, my voice still under control but inevitably rising.

Big Pete interposed. I felt the presence of Jack behind me.

“Something wrong, here?” Pete was trying to sound calm.

“She's treating me like trash, ignoring me and calling me names,” Wash said, though his voice was not as full of righteous wrath as it might have been.

“I can't imagine Lily doing that,” Pete said.

Explaining. People always want you to explain. I yearned to walk out speechlessly, but this was one of Jack's favorite places.

“I don't care to discuss crime scenes and how this woman died. The woman who was killed in Shakespeare.”

Pete stared at his son. “Wash, you want to talk about dead bodies, remind me to show you some pictures of things I saw in Viet Nam.”

“You got pictures, Dad?” Wash sounded stunned and happy.

“'Scuse us, Jack, Lily. Wash and I got some talking to do.”

Jack and I left in a hurry.

I tried to figure out if I needed to apologize to Jack, but no matter how I looked at it, this little run-in was not my fault. However, Jack wasn't talking, and I wondered if he was angry.

“It's really weird, isn't it,” he said suddenly. “You'd think nice people like Pete and Marietta, his wife, would have such great genes their kids couldn't turn out bad. And then, look at Wash. He has to learn every lesson over and over, lessons he shouldn't even have to be taught. Things he should know by…instinct.”

Where had that come from? I followed the trail of that thought for a moment. Genetics. Kids turning out differently from their parents. Okay.

“Do you want a baby, Jack?” We'd been dodging this conversation ever since I'd lost the baby.

“For the life of me, Lily, I don't know.” It was clear he'd only been waiting for me to open the subject. “If you had kept the baby, if everything had gone okay, I would have been proud to have a baby with you. When the baby…” He hesitated.

“Miscarried,” I supplied.

“When the baby miscarried, I guess you could tell how sad I was. But the next day, I maybe felt a little relief, too. What changes that would have made in our lives, huh?”

I nodded when he glanced over to check my reaction.

“Can you tell me how you feel?” he said.

“Like you.”

“No elaboration on that?”

“It surprised me when you cried. It made me love you more.” If we were going to say things, we might as well say everything.

“I hated to see you bleeding and weak. It scared me to death. And I would have loved to have been the father of our baby.”

“Didn't ever want to be the dad of Lindsey Wilkerson's baby?” I asked, keeping my face poker-straight. I was able to dodge Jack's hand when it slapped in my direction, because I was waiting for it.

“The world's best argument for birth control,” he said.

I didn't laugh out loud, but I smiled. His sideways glance caught it, and he grinned at me, that wicked look I loved.

Tamsin and Cliff came over that night. They called first, and I said it was all right, but I shouldn't have. I really didn't want to see them, didn't want to hear about Tamsin's multiple problems. But she had helped me, so I was obliged to her, a yoke I found nearly intolerable. I reminded myself not to ask for help again.

I should have been ashamed of my grudging attitude. And maybe I was, a little. But being close to Tamsin now seemed a risky thing.

“How are you feeling?” Tamsin's question seemed on the perfunctory side, especially since she didn't meet my eyes to hear my answer.

“I'm all right. You and Cliff?” I motioned them to chairs and offered them drinks, as I was obligated to do. Jack got Cliff a Coke, but Tamsin waved the query off.

“You can imagine how strange it is to find out that this policeman was really a famous writer,” Tamsin told me.

I nodded. I could imagine that.

“And then I finally recognized that woman last night. Detective Stokes.”

Jack reached over my shoulder to hand Cliff his drink.

“And, Lily, what I want to know is, why me?”

I couldn't believe I'd heard her correctly. Tamsin Lynd, of all people, was asking the unanswerable. Was this something some victims were just bound to go through, no matter how smart or clearly victimized they were?

That couldn't be true. And why had she decided to talk to me about it? Because I was Supervictim?

I thought for a minute, but I decided there was no way to get around this but to talk to Tamsin about it.

“Why are you different?” I asked her.

“What do you mean?”

“Would you let us ask that question in counseling group?”

She flushed red. “I see what you mean.”

“Do you think you're better than us, because you're being stalked instead of being raped?”

Cliff looked horrified and upset, and his hand moved as if he were going to get my attention to signal to me, but I gave him a quelling look. Tamsin had dragged him along, and Jack was in the room, but this conversation was between me and her.

“Oh, Lily, I hate to see that in myself!” Tamsin was really upset, now. But upset in a more intelligent way.

“Why not you, Tamsin? What makes you superior or invulnerable?”

“I've got it, now,” she breathed. “I see that. But I guess what I was thinking, was not that I should be spared because I was superior, but because I'm not. I'm an overweight, nearly middle-aged woman in a crowded and poorly paid profession. There's nothing remarkable about me. How did I attract the attention of someone so determined?”

“There is plenty special about you, honey,” Cliff said, his voice desperately earnest. “You are the most sweet-natured, kindest—”

“Oh, Cliff.” Tamsin's face was radiant with pleasure, but deprecating. “You're the only one who believes that,” she added with a little laugh.

I wasn't going to sit here and bathe Tamsin in compliments. She was quite right. I liked her—a little—and I appreciated her, but there was nothing exceptional about Tamsin Lynd in my eyes…except her victimization.

“You just got picked by the Claw.” That was as good an explanation as I could come up with.

“The Claw?”

“You know that game they have out in the Wal-Mart entryway? The one where you put in some quarters and the metal claw swings down over a bin of stuffed animals and swoops down at random, and maybe picks one up, maybe not? That's the Claw.”

“Lily!” Tamsin looked at me with the oddest quizzical, expression. “That's the most depressing philosophy I've ever heard.”

I shrugged. I wasn't in the Pollyanna business. “The Claw picked you up, Tamsin. So you have a stalker, and Janet doesn't. I got raped, you didn't. Saralynn was murdered, Carla wasn't. The claw passed her over.”

“So you don't believe a divine plan runs the universe?”

I just laughed. Some plan.

“Don't you believe that most people are innately good?”

“No.” In fact, I found the fact that some people did believe that to be absolutely incomprehensible.

Tamsin looked really horrified. “You don't believe that we're only given the burdens we can handle?”

“Obviously not.”

She tried again. “Do you believe in the eventual punishment of evildoers?”

I shrugged.

“Then how do you go on living?” Tamsin was tearful, but not as personally tearful, as she had been before.

“How do I go on living? A day at a time, like everyone else. A few years ago, it was an hour at a time. For a while, it was minute by minute.”

“What for?”

Cliff looked like he wished he was anywhere but here. But Jack, I saw, was leaning forward to hear what I was saying.

“At first, I just wanted to beat the…ones that attacked me.” I picked my words carefully. I was being as honest as I knew how. “Then, I couldn't add to my parents' miseries any more by dying. Though I did think about suicide, often. No more fear, no more scars, no more remembering.

“But after a while, I began to get more involved in trying to make living work. Trying to find a way to make my days, if not my nights, productive and make a pattern to stick to.” I took a drink from my glass of water.

“Is that what you think I should do?”

“I don't know what you should do,” I said, amazed anyone would ask advice of me. “That's for you to figure out. You're a professional at helping people figure out what they should do. I guess that doesn't really help you right now.”

“No,” she said, her voice soft and weary. “It's not helping, right now.”

I gave her the only piece of advice, the only philosophy, that I cherished. “You have to live well to defeat whoever's doing this to you,” I said. “You can't let them win.”

“Is that the point of living, to not let him win? What about me? When I do I get to live for myself?”

“That is entirely up to you,” I told her. I stood up, so she'd go.

“I thought you, of all people, would have the answers, would have more sympathy.”

“The point is, that doesn't make any difference.” I looked Tamsin straight in the eyes. “No matter how much sympathy I have for you, it won't heal you faster or slower. You're not a victim of cosmic proportions. There are millions of us. That doesn't make your personal struggle less. That just increases your knowledge of pain in this world.”

“I think,” said Tamsin, as she and Cliff went through the door, “that I should have stayed at home.”

“That depends on what you wanted.” I shut the door behind them. I could see Jack's face. “What?” I asked, sharp and quick.

“Lily, don't you think you could have been a little more…”

“Touchy-feely? Warm?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I told her exactly how it is, Jack. I've had years to think about this. I don't know why everyone feels like they're supposed to be safe all the time.”

Jack raised an eyebrow in a questioning way.

“Think about it,” I said. “No one expected to be safe until this century, if you read a little history. Think of the thousands of years before—years with no law, when the sword ruled. No widespread system of justice; no immunizations against disease. The local lord free to kill the husbands, husbands free to rape and kill their wives. Childbirth often fatal. No antibiotics. It's only here and now that women are raised believing they'll be safe. And it serves us false. It's not true. It dulls our sense of fear, which is what saves our lives.”

Jack looked stunned. “Why have you never told me you feel this way?”

“We've just never gotten around to talking about it.”

“How can you even share a bed with me, if you hate men that much?”

“I don't hate men, Jack.”
Just some of them. I despise the rest
. “I just don't believe—no, let me turn that around. I do believe that women should be more self-sufficient and cautious.” That was probably the mildest way I could put it.

Jack opened his mouth to say something else, and I held up my hand. “I know this isn't fair, but I've talked as much as I can for one evening. I feel like I pulled my guts out for inspection. Can we be quiet from now on? We can talk more tomorrow if you want to.”